by Joy Dettman
‘That obnoxious female,’ Lorna named her. A fair description. Sissy had become obnoxious in appearance and manner.
On the second occasion, as she’d walked Lorna down the aisle to their front pew, Amber, recognising Sissy’s mammoth back, had warned Lorna who’d led the way out through the side door, then through the shrubbery to the car park.
That was the day Amber decided it was time to move on. She’d accrued funds enough to rent her own small unit – somewhere. She’d looked at advertisements until learning that her pension would be hard-pressed to pay the rent on a single bedroom unit.
And was Sissy likely to recognise her? Amber’s once beige-blonde shoulder-length hair was now short silky white curls. Her shoes had once been bought to last, her garments chosen for their lack of colour. In Kew, she’d been able to satisfy her craving for smart expensive shoes, for the pretty hats and the pretty frocks she’d craved in her youth.
Since her release from the asylum she’d been in receipt of a pension. It still arrived each fortnight. Had her benefactor known about it, Amber would have been out on the street. Only last week Lorna had circled a report in the Age of the arrest of one hundred and eighty Greek Australians alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to defraud the Social Security Department. Amber Morrison’s private mailbox was in the city. She accessed it monthly on hair-cutting days, when Amber’s bankbook had a brief outing before being posted back to Box 282 GPO, MELB.
It amused her to imagine Lorna’s expression should she learn of her own involvement in a conspiracy to defraud. She’d been instrumental in securing Miss Elizabeth Duckworth’s pension, and thus obtaining at no cost to herself her ‘Duckworth’/cleaner/guide-dog/reader/cook.
*
Jenny’s mind was on bank accounts – Georgie’s bank account in particular. She was opening mail addressed to her daughter, hoping for a statement from the Commonwealth Bank and evidence of another cashed cheque. The last statement had shown three cashed cheques, two for uneven amounts, which suggested payment of bills, but one had been for two hundred dollars.
There was no bank statement amongst today’s mail. Bills from suppliers, a three-year term deposit was maturing at a city bank.
‘Nothing?’ Emma asked.
‘Nothing.’
Until circumstances had thrown them together, Jenny and Emma had rarely spoken. Emma, a year or two Jim’s senior, had been raising a family before Jenny became the town scandal. They’d spent a couple of uncomfortable days together, but women, forced to spend eight hours a day in close confines, don’t remain strangers. They got on well now, and were hopeful that morning. Prospective renters were arriving from Melbourne at eleven, their call the only one received from the agent’s city advertisement.
Two weeks ago the Bendigo couple had driven up to look the place over, which had taken them five minutes. The woman sneered at Charlie’s old cash drawer and docket book system then, without a word, walked out. Her cocky little bantam husband had at least nodded a form of goodbye.
‘Heritage’, had since been added to the agent’s advertisement. This morning’s couple knew what they were driving hours to see – if they understood English. Their name was Con-dappa-doppa-something or other.
Emma, as desperate as Jenny to return to her own life, had lined up a dozen customers to come in at five- or ten-minute intervals – her sisters, her brother’s wives, her husband and her eighty-odd year old mother. All is fair in love and war and in the getting rid of unwanted property.
Jenny had done what she could. She’d raided Ray’s insurance account to pay for a few improvements since the Bendigo woman’s sneer. After the fire Georgie and Teddy Hall had broken into the shop through the storeroom window to retrieve the shop’s and the ute’s spare keys. There was new glass now in that window, and the smell of fresh paint.
By eleven, the prospective renters hadn’t arrived, which necessitated an alteration to Emma’s customer roster, but the Con- doppa-somethings eventually came and while Jenny played guide, Emma handled the customers, who rang Charlie White’s cow bell at five- and ten-minute intervals.
The Greek couple barely glanced at the bookwork where Jim’s neat figures took over from Georgie’s larger figures. Jenny showed them the cash drawer, the old docket book system – the heritage bit – then left them to look around. They’d driven a long way and were in no hurry to leave. They walked out the back door and came in the front, then reversed their steps.
Jim called just before one, impatient for a verdict.
‘No verdict,’ Jenny whispered. ‘They’ve got their measuring tape out now, and we haven’t had a customer since the rush of Fultons. Call Amy and Maisy and ask them to come in and buy something.’
He didn’t call them, but drove around to buy a packet of cornflakes. Jenny added two packets of cigarettes to his order, two kilos of sugar and a pound of butter. The prospective renters watched Jim hand over his money and receive his change and docket then followed him out to the veranda where the male leaned against a leaning veranda post. A passing dog approached, wanting that post, but the woman flung a stream of Greek at it and the dog moved on.
‘Trudy would have understood that,’ Jenny said. ‘Her girlfriend’s grandmother can’t speak a word of English.’
For half an hour more the Con-doppas stood in the shade of Charlie’s veranda, eyeing the few customers who entered and left, the woman commenting on each in her own tongue, Jenny and Emma coming up with possible translations by means of her expression, his tone and the length of his reply.
Then a black car with dark tinted windows pulled into the gutter out front and the Greek couple got into it.
‘It looks like a mafia hit man’s car,’ Emma said.
‘Drug baron,’ Jenny said. ‘They’re looking for a replacement for Monk’s cellar.’
On the night of the kidnap, the police searching for Tracy had found a crop of marijuana growing beneath artificial light in Monk’s old root cellar.
‘You could fit a good few plants in here,’ Emma said. ‘Plenty of lighting.’
Then the prospective renters were gone, and all Jenny could do was wait.
For two hours she watched the phone, willing the agent to call. He didn’t, so she called him and, no, he hadn’t heard from the Greek couple, however, the Wallis couple from Bendigo had phoned again this morning and made an offer. They wanted a month by month lease, with an option to buy written into the contract, along with a purchase price well below the value of the building, business and stock. They also wanted a no fault escape clause added to the lease.
The agent called the following day. The Wallis couple were interested in another property in Mortlake. Their offer was only good until tomorrow at ten.
‘Tell them to buy in Mortlake,’ Jenny said. She couldn’t inflict that Wallis woman or her bantam rooster mate on Woody Creek.
REST IN PEACE
Bernie had given up going to work, and with no porridge and cream, no eggs and bacon to get out of bed for, he was rarely out before Days of Our Lives. Joss Palmer, his brother-in-law foreman, ran the mill, and one Friday in April, he phoned Maisy, who shook Bernie awake at ten.
‘Who’s dead?’
‘No one. Sam O’Brien cut half of his fingers off,’ she said.
‘Shit!’ Bernie replied.
The saws were silent when he got down there. Old Sam was sitting on a log nursing his towel-wrapped hand, but otherwise looking happy enough. Bernie wasn’t. Macdonald’s had a good record; their equipment was modern and accidents rare.
‘How the bloody hell did it happen?’
A few had seen those fingers fly. A few told what they’d seen. A few stood back smoking, maybe thinking what Bernie was thinking, that a bloke, three months away from retirement, might donate a couple of knuckles from his left hand for a decent compo payout.
And there was no money being made with a dozen and a half men standing around blowing smoke and expecting to be paid today. He wrote a cheque for the
wages bill, then drove the victim and two of his three missing knuckles down to the hospital.
It was seven o’clock before they returned to town, and neither Bernie nor his passenger sober. They hadn’t spent the entire day at the Farmer’s Arms. After dropping Sam off at the hospital, Bernie had driven down to the Holden place to test-drive a new ute. He’d taken it for a spin out to the tombstone place to find out how much longer Dawny’s grave would be without a stone, and while waiting for an answer, he picked up a brochure – because it was there.
He could have gone home. He should have gone home. Old Sam could have caught the bus. Instead Bernie went to the hotel for a beer and a counter lunch – a beautiful wedge of meat pie and a pile of mashed potatoes – where, after a second beer, he’d decided to order a new ute, white – and let the bastards laugh about that.
If old Sam hadn’t needed a painkiller when the hospital turned him loose, Bernie might have driven home sober, but by four, Sam was suffering for his compo payout, so they’d called into the Farmer’s Arms where Bernie ordered two whiskies. One never being enough for old Sam, he’d paid for two more. Bernie paid for the next two, pleased to have a drinker at his side. Sometime later they’d started looking at the pictures in that brochure then old Sam, as he was apt to do after a few whiskies, started offering a bit of good advice.
Maisy waited dinner. Bernie couldn’t rightly say what it was – nor could anyone else. He tested a forkful – and it tasted as bad as it looked.
Maisy wanted to know where he’d been till this time of night.
‘I ordered a tombstone,’ he said.
‘For old Sam? Jessica told me it was only his hand.’
‘He’ll be able to afford to pay for his own bloody tombstone,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m having my name put on it.’
‘You’re not dead yet,’ Maisy said.
‘It’s for your granddaughter,’ he said.
Maisy stopped shovelling whatever it was they were shovelling. ‘It’s too late to put your name on anything to do with her, and Jenny will already have ordered one.’
‘Then you’d better tell her or she’ll end up with one at each end.’
‘You tell her. You ordered it.’
‘She’d spit in my bloody eye and blind me.’
‘If she does, you deserve it.’
‘I’ll drive you around there.’
‘As if I’d get into a car with you tonight – and I thought that you’d given up the drink.’
‘Ring her up then?’
‘You did it, you ring her up. I’ve told you before that I’m not interfering in their private business.’
Bernie had known better days. The pie and mashed potato lunch still swimming nicely in whisky, he chose to leave it unpolluted by macaroni and slimy greens and he walked outside to his ute. Drove by Hooper’s corner, turned right at King Street, right into Blunt’s Road and right again into Hooper Street, this time slowing as he passed their driveway. He didn’t turn in, or stop. Drove by, then turned right onto Three Pines Road where he braked directly opposite their house and sat staring at it, scratching his skin cancers.
There was no sign of movement in the garden, so he got out and crossed over the road to hide behind their rosebush hedge. By summer’s end it was tall enough to hide a man of his height. He didn’t have much of it. He was peering between the thorns and the few remaining blooms when a door slammed. He ducked low, knowing they must have seen him, or his ute. Half a dozen of their windows looked west, and everyone and their dog knew his ute.
Lanky Jim came limping around the corner to the west-side veranda, looking for him, probably thinking that Maisy had dropped dead, so Bernie showed himself, or showed his head between the roses, then without preamble, let rip.
‘Me and Mum thought we’d like to take care of young Margot’s tombstone – that’s if Jenny’s got no objections.’ And too bloody late if she had. He’d already written the cheque.
‘I’ll speak to her,’ Jim said, turning, limping back indoors, leaving his rose hedge thorns to punish the rapist.
Bernie didn’t go home. He drove on down Three Pines Road to where it forked. He took the right fork, out Forest Road.
Gertrude Foote’s boundary gate was closed. If he hadn’t been drunk, he might not have opened it, but he was, so he did, and drove on down to the walnut tree.
‘Shit,’ he said.
He hadn’t been near the place since the night of the fire and nor had anyone else as far as he could see. Blackened stumps, blackened piles of junk and silver-white ash were all that remained of the house he and his working bee had built around Gertrude Foote’s two-roomed hut, back in ’58. Maybe he’d been thinking of his kid at the time – his or Macka’s. He hoped he had. He no longer knew why he’d done it, and the whys and wherefores didn’t matter much now. That girl was dead and the house was rubble, all bar the sitting room chimney and fireplace that old Jorge, the Albanian, had built.
Is there anything more lonely than a chimney left standing amid a pile of blackened junk? Maybe there is. Beer was Bernie’s choice of drink. Beer gave him a lift. Whisky made him lonely.
He sat in his ute, staring at the site for a while, then he got out to walk, and later to lean against the chimney, commiserating with it while attempting to identify items.
He could make out the blackened, twisted frame of a bed’s springs, set up like a piece of modern art to be photographed by a city cameraman. He’d seen it in one of the newspapers at the time. That was where they’d found the girl’s body, or what had been left of it – in her bed – or on what had been left of her bed.
He stared for minutes at the bedsprings, then walked across ash and twisted corrugated iron, dragged the bedsprings free and loaded them onto his ute. He’d have a new ute next week. May as well get some use out of the old one.
A heavy man full of whisky doesn’t move fast, not on a pair of bandy legs never designed to support his mass of weight, but they kept him going. He transferred eight or ten sheets of corrugated iron to the ute’s tray while his mind travelled back to the war. Join the navy and see the world, they used to say. He and Macka had joined the army to escape rape charges. They’d seen a bit of the world, a bombed, burnt out world. They’d seen a lot of burnt houses and their burnt owners, seen so much death close up it had no longer meant much to either of them.
They’d always wished themselves taller, had envied the kids who had outstripped them at fifteen, sixteen. They’d grown an inch or so taller than their old man, could look down on Maisy and the sisters, all runts. Not that lack of height had mattered much when there’d been the two of them. They’d fought as one, aware that no youth or man could do them much harm while they’d watched each other’s backs. It had worked during five years of war. They’d come home without a scratch. A lot hadn’t. Three they’d taunted in the schoolyard hadn’t come home. They’d taunted Jim Hooper. He’d come home with half of one leg and a decent section of his mind missing – or for a time his mind had gone missing, and maybe still was.
He made kids’ fairy books, he and Jenny and the McPhersons. He refused to march on Anzac Day. Men who had lost two legs marched on Anzac Day. Bernie and Macka marched every year, side by side in their uniforms – until they’d grown out of their uniforms and had to march in suits, their medals pinned to their breast pockets.
Bernie would march alone this year – or he wouldn’t.
‘You bastard of a year,’ he muttered.
The light was gone before he got an old iron bedstead apart, the redhead’s bed. He tossed the bits of it onto his ute and called his load enough. Too late to unload it – the tip closed its gates at six – so he took it home to spend the night in the driveway, then went to the bathroom to shower off a bit of the dirt.
Too much of him to wash, places he couldn’t reach easily – and too much of that dirt beneath his skin. He could feel it crawling there tonight. Whisky had always got him crawling with termites from the past.
Maisy was mak
ing tea when he came out. She offered two slabs of her fossilised cardboard smeared with cottage cheese, a slice of tomato on each. He pushed them back to her side of the table. She offered him one of her blood pressure pills, with a glass of water.
‘Take it,’ she ordered. ‘You look ready to have a stroke.’
‘You take it,’ he said and pushed it back to her side.
‘Do as you’re told for once in your life, Bernie. I’m not losing another one of you. Did you tell Jenny about your tombstone?’
‘I told her lanky coot,’ he said.
‘What did he say?’
‘That he’d bloody tell her.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That we’d put up a bloody stone.’
‘You didn’t tell him you’d already ordered it.’
‘He didn’t tell me that they’d already ordered one either.’
‘What if she says no?’
‘You can use it as a garden ornament, now for Christ’s sake leave me alone. I’ve got a bastard of a headache.’
‘Strokes start with a headache. Take that pill!’
He took it to shut her up. He tried a bit of her cardboard later. A man has to eat something.
*
Bernie was out of the house before eight the following morning, aware he had to get rid of the load on his ute before Maisy saw it and wanted to know what he’d been up to. He was embarrassed about what he’d been up to, and when the tip man arrived to open the gate at nine, Bernie was at the head of the queue.
A potpourri of stinks greeted him – rotten fruit, dead cat, fish heads – a melding of odours that intoxicates the common house fly. They swarmed like bees, dive-bombing Bernie’s eyes, aiming for his nostrils as he added his load to a pile of the unnameable.
As kids he and Macka had done a lot of poking around out here; they hadn’t noticed the stink or the flies. Not a lot of rotten food got tossed out when they’d been kids. Families had eaten it. Old Sam O’Brien was on about the bad years of the Great Depression yesterday. Get a bit of grog into a few of the older blokes and they’d talk for hours about the struggle to keep food in the mouths of their kids through those years. Bernie hadn’t noticed them. He’d never known hunger, not back then he hadn’t.